


Losing Time

by mortalitasi



Category: Dragon Age, Dragon Age: Asunder - Fandom
Genre: Angst, F/M, Friendship, Gen, General
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-25
Updated: 2014-08-25
Packaged: 2018-02-14 14:56:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2196081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mortalitasi/pseuds/mortalitasi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first two minutes of Rhys' stay in the Western Approach teaches him all he needs and wants to know about the place - he doesn't like it. Not at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Losing Time

It’s a cold night. Not very surprising.

They’re all sitting as near to the fire as they can stand. It makes Rhys wish he had the golem’s endurance—or, he supposes, immunity—to the extreme temperatures of the badlands.

The wind is sour here, like the lingering misery of the Blight never left all those years ago, and occasionally Rhys can hear the distant keening cries of creatures he’d rather not think about for too long. Remembering that there is next to no cover out in this cracked, barren plain is of little comfort. The only thing good about it is that the darkspawn are and would be as defenseless as them. It’s a white lie, of course, since the darkspawn have no trouble traveling underground, but we all lie to ourselves at one point or another.

“What was she like?”

Adrian’s voice cuts through the silence and the thin air like a knife. She’s still not speaking to him. Another one of those not very surprising things.

“What was who like?” Wynne responds, not even looking up from where she’s working on repairing a tear in her cloak.

Their voices don’t disturb Cole, who, for once, is caught in a fitful sleep apparently devoid of any nightmares. He sleeps like the dead, when slumber takes him, and Rhys is glad to let him rest.

“The Hero of Ferelden,” the other mage says, steepling her fingers and leaning her chin on them. The firelight turns the color of her thick hair to burnished copper. It almost looks like she’s surrounded by a halo of flame, alive and flickering. She’s as angry as any blaze, just as consuming and unstoppable. It used to endear him to her—he used to love that about her. Now all he can react with is exasperation and spurts of willing compromise. Maybe he really is getting too old for all of this.

“What do you want to know about her?” Wynne says, though everyone has turned from their spots to listen more attentively. Even Evangeline has crooked her head in their direction. She’s not moved her eyes from the bleak horizon, but Rhys can tell she’s listening. He doesn’t know when he started noticing things like that about her, and he half-wishes it would stop. Awareness of a person is the first step in—well. Yes. He wishes it would stop.

“Anything,” Adrian returns, shrugging. “Was it true she was an elf?”

Wynne raises one brow at that. “Yes. A finer archer and rogue I have never met. What little she told me about her life before the Wardens was peaceful. Idyllic, even. She never truly recovered from being taken from her clan.”

“Clan?” Pharamond now says, his curiosity finally vocal, his blue eyes bright with interest. It’s hard to believe he was ever Tranquil—the elf’s face is always full of expression, and even just the few days’ distance from Adamant has leant him some weight and good color. He must have been spectacularly handsome in his prime, when his features were free of the weight of exhaustion and melancholy. Rhys doesn’t want to think about what may happen to Pharamond when they return. He doesn’t want to think about a lot of things.

“The Warden was Dalish before being conscripted,” Wynne confirms, and Pharamond makes a small sound of delight. “She… was reluctant to be bound to her duty.”

“That doesn’t sound very heroic,” Rhys pitches in, and Adrian shoots him a dirty glare. He ignores it.

“She never called herself a hero,” Wynne says. A fond smile crosses her face, and Rhys feels something sharp and unpleasant spike in his chest at the sight. That’s a motherly smile—the kind he’s entitled to but has never gotten from her. He’d count himself lucky if she didn’t treat him like a boy just grown into his second set of robes.  _Pull yourself together, man. You don’t know her and you don’t want to._  He blames his childish reaction on the dismal circumstances, but the nasty prickle of envy is still there when Adrian speaks again.

“Yes, but what was she  _like_? Did she snore, or—or wear funny things, or have bad breath?”

Wynne sets the hem of her cloak aside, now thinking in earnest. “She was quiet, and always watching. Quick on her feet. Generous. Practical. And had the worst financial sense I’d ever seen in anyone. She was a good girl. A good leader. And a dear friend.”

There’s a rumble from the far side of camp as Shale stirs, opening her glowing eyes. Her granite mouth moves slowly. If Rhys didn’t know any better, he’d have thought it were showing emotion. “It was not as squishy as others.”

Wynne laughs a little, softly, but it is an unhappy sound. “She really wasn’t.”

Pharamond glances at Wynne, unexpectedly silent and calm. “You speak of her like she’s dead.”

The elder mage looks down at the hands clasped in her lap, and the motion makes her look older than ever before. She looks so tired—and so very sad. “She’s… missing. Has been for a few years, now.”

That effectively stoppers any lingering chance of further conversation. Suddenly, the camp no longer seems warm or welcoming, and the darkness somehow feels closer than ever before. Rhys shivers and draws his cloak tighter around him, hoping beyond hope that it will miraculously chase away the chill in his heart. He stares into the campfire, trying not to look at anything else but the jumping embers and the swirling, hair-thin discs of ash rising into the air above it, though he is intensely and twistedly glad for the hush.

He doesn’t want to know anything else about the Warden.

—

The plains stretching around the deserted ruins of Adamant have been quiet, of late. They have seen winter pass into spring.

The evidence of the tragedy in the fortress has rotted away by now, or is well on the way to—dust has crawled back into the fortress, settling over the bodies and the parts and the torn cloths, even Pharamond’s undisturbed, immaculate study. The tomes are dissolving in their shelves, falling to pieces, and darkspawn pick through the wreckage. The ones brave enough to approach the crumbling haunt, anyway.

Outside and far away, the grey and aged oak still stands tall, if not so proud as it once was. There are times during the day that the breeze stirs its ash-white leaves and blows the loose pieces of its flaking bark free; at night when the winds are still and the pinpoint stars appear in the sky and the lights dance across the skeletal rocks, there is almost a sense of peace to be had about the place.

If someone ever came by the oak and stood by it long into the dark, head bent in grief, hand curling into its trunk, the lights above and the ghosts of Adamant would be their only witness. If someone ever laid sprigs of lovely Andraste’s Grace across the roots, above the mound at the base of the tree—no one would know. Not of the smell of home or the curl of the white petals, or the meaning something so simple had once, long ago, to those that mattered. No one would know.

And they never will. 


End file.
